playing games, racial categorization is
typically used to style the visual appearance of a player’s avatar or trigger several different canned reactions when
conversing with a non-player character. In social media, users typically join
groups based on shared taste or categorize each other as “colleagues” or “
family members” using privacy settings. In
such systems, category membership
is determined in a top-down fashion;
members often slot into single, homogeneous groups with no hybrid
identities, identities at the margins of
groups, or identities that change over
time. They neither provide developers
and users elegant ways to avoid box effects nor simulate them to create via
more expressive virtual worlds.

Simulating and avoiding box ef-fects. Our “Chimeria platform” (hereaf-ter Chimeria) is a system that supportssimulating of physical world identityphenomena in virtual identity systemsranging from social-media accountsto videogames. Such simulation aug-ments virtual identity models withgradience and dynamics, increasingtheir sociocultural nuance. Such ad-ditional nuance supports demonstrat-ing how box effects are detrimental.And demonstrations are performed bycreating expressive systems (such asvideogames) that reveal how forms ofdiscrimination function or avoidingbox effects in utilitarian systems (suchas social-media platforms). It does soin two primary ways: modeling the un-derlying structure of many social cat-egorization phenomena with a compu-tational engine; and enabling users tobuild their own creative applicationsabout social categorization using theengine as a backbone. The underlyingengine allows for the movement of in-dividuals within, between, and acrosssocial categories.

It also allows for category members
to have varying degrees of centrality to
each group, assimilate or naturalize in
relation to a hegemonic group, and be
members of multiple groups. These
aspects of the system are grounded in
theories from sociolinguistics, 33
cognitive science, 23,h and the sociology
of classification. 3 The system is thus
capable of modeling complex social
behaviors (such as “impression management,” addressed later). We next
describe the architecture of Chimeria
and two applications built with it.

Chimeria authoring platform.
Chimeria supports simulating experiences
based on social-group membership
using a data-driven approach and consists of three main components (see
Figure 6). Simulations may take different forms (such as a 2D visual novel
game, a fictitious social network chat
narrative, or 3D virtual environmenti).

Chimeria engine. This is our implementation of a mathematical model
of users’ degrees of membership
across multiple categories. The
Chimeria engine is designed to calculate,
modify, and simulate changes to these
memberships, acting as the system’s
logical processing component. It models users’ category memberships as
gradient values relative to the more
central members, 3, 17, 23 enabling more
representational nuance than binary
status of member/nonmember commonly used in applications; for example, on the social network Facebook,
h Lakoff cited a convergence of work in multiple
fields, suggesting a need for more nuanced
categorization models. For example, from computer science, he cited Zadeh’s fuzzy logic, 40
which is useful for formalizing our models of
gradient membership but unnecessary for the
current implementation.

i We also made a demo integrating Chimeria

with a 3D game interface, using the Unitygame engine; see https://unity3d.com/able more nuanced identity-categorymodels that avoid them. Modelingbox effects is necessary for the firstpart of the dream—being whomeveryou want using a virtual identity—because being someone is not justa matter of graphical appearance,but of modeling systematic experi-ences. The second part of the AvatarDream—understanding the experi-ence of others—requires modelingsocial experiences more robustly toavoid box effects. While one may notbe able to directly experience what itmeans to live a physical-world life asa member of another social categoryusing virtual identity, it is possible touse virtual identities to convey someof the patterns of experience peoplein other categories face and that ex-ist structurally in societies. Enablingusers to be a virtual female superheroor even just a more suave and dandyself requires techniques to help themimagine the subjective experience ofthose types of identity. Our platformdemonstrates representational ben-efits of a gradient model of socialidentity; our examples demonstrateapplications that aim to engendercritical awareness about the nuancesof social identity.

Computational models of social
identity are found in a wide range of
digital-media works. In computer role-